The Truth About Britain’s Wildfires
As you can see, about three quarters of the wildfire areas to date occurred in February and March, which as we know were very dry months this year. Clearly, however, this cannot be blamed on climate change because the Met Office keep telling us that winters are supposed to be getting wetter as a result!
But more to the point, that big spike in the first week of April was accounted for by a series of gigantic fires in the Mountains of Mourne, believed to have been started deliberately:
Since that outbreak, nothing out of the ordinary has occurred.
But behind all of this data, a real problem seems to be emerging, which has been picked up on X:
The Telegraph also has the story:
Labour’s rewilding plans risk sparking a surge in wildfires across Britain, gamekeepers have claimed.
The Government is proposing to ban winter burning – a traditional upland management technique that reduces the amount of fuel for potential fires – from more than half of all peatland in England.
It is claimed the changes will help to “re-wet” Britain’s peat bogs, reduce the risk of wildfires and cut carbon emissions.
Environmentalists want to preserve peat bogs because they soak up vast quantities of carbon. But landowners and gamekeepers have claimed that, far from protecting the environment, the burning restrictions will instead leave Britain’s moors and heaths at the mercy of wildfires that will be “too large to fight”.
Winter burns create firebreaks in upland areas by forming strips where there is less flammable foliage, thereby limiting the speed at which wildfires can spread.
But in 2021, the burns were banned from areas of “deep peat” – where it extends for 40cm or deeper – in conservation areas, totalling 222,000 hectares of land.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is now consulting on plans to extend the burning restrictions to 368,000 hectares of peat by lowering the threshold for “deep peat” to 30cm.
The department argues that wetter peat will reduce the chance of wildfires. But gamekeepers have warned the changes would leave swathes of the countryside vulnerable.
Full story here.
The 2030 Agenda is a global framework established by the United Nations to address pressing challenges like poverty, inequality, climate change and environmental degradation by 2030. It includes 17 Sustainable Development Goals, including biodiversity loss.
We can also see a connection here with the recent wildfires in Spain, mostly in Galicia – the Telegraph reported this week:
In Galicia, large stretches of unmanaged vegetation and depopulated villages in forested land have led to the build-up of wildfire fuel, said Adrian Regos, an ecologist at the Biological Mission of Galicia, a research institute.
We also know that exactly the same phenomenon of abandoned plantations in Maui was the reason why the fires got out of hand there a couple of years ago. There the well-managed plantations of a few years ago have since been abandoned and overgrown with savanna like invasive grasses, which act as a tinderbox.
As I say, a lot to unpack.
But it is simplistic in the extreme to blame any of these fires on climate change.
This article was first published on Not A Lot of People Know That.
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The report about the absence of land management in some areas was also published by the BBC World Service recently.
In Aude, the French department to the north of the department where I live, tidy vineyards and orchards were left untouched by the fires, while the unkept land which surrounds them, covered with dead, dry wood and vegetation, was scorched to a crisp.
Motorways acted as firebreaks, too.
And yes, it was most definitely started by arsonists who want to keep the climate crisis boondoggle alive – either because they are profiting directly from it or because they hate life. The weather was not exceptionally warm or dry.
And everyone knows it, because most people are still related to – or know very well – the many, often independent and relatively small independent farmers and vignerons who either own their land or are tenants.
An infernal situation – literally and metaphorically.
I live in Saddleworth. We are surrounded by extensive moorland. Many years ago I worked for a local Water Board, as they were then known and laboured on the Saddleworth Moors. Occasionally we had fires to deal with. The old guys always said that most moorland fires were started by visitors ie people who didn’t know how to behave in the countryside. Peat moors do not ignite easily for the simple reason that peat holds alot of moisture. The idea that we have wildfires is largely bollox and certainly around Saddleworth probably every moorland fire started in the last ten years can be attributed to kids with matches or townies leaving disposable barbecues. They don’t happen.
And I currently still work in and on these moors. They Do Not spontaneously combust.
Gamekeepers want to burn heather to increase the number of grouse that can be shot for “fun”. They certainly don’t do it to try and create fire breaks and for them to claim they do is just cynical PR. They sometimes do things that increase the risk of large fire e.g. draining very wet areas and starting “controlled” fires when it’s windy or very dry and the risk of them getting out of control or leading to separate fires starting from wind blown sparks is higher than average. I don’t know if the large spike in fires in June was due to arson but given that this year has been hotter and drier than average, natural variability rather than man made climate change, it shouldn’t be at all surprising that there’s a higher than average number of fires. The Telegraph, and game keepers, provide no evidence that rewilding is behind this year’s high number of fires. It would be possible to compare the places where fires have occurred with a map of where rewilding has taken place. There’s no attempt to do this, presumably because the inconvenient truth, for gamekeepers and their supporters in the right wing media, is that… Read more »
A couple of years ago I saw a short video on TCW, made by an aboriginal professor. He said that for thousands of years the aborigines have cleared the loose scrub in the bush, to reduce the fuel for bush fires, that occur annually. He said, since the Greens took office this had been banned, and the consequences were huge bush fires.!
How come the greenies think they know better than farmers, aborigines etc who have tended the land for hundreds of years, and know what they’re doing?
As far as I know, nobody has ever claimed that the Far Left are intelligent and know what they are doing.